One of the most overlooked aspects in poker strategy is choosing the right seat at a table. The majority of players simply click on the first open seat they see and start playing. This method of choosing a seat might be totally fine for beginners, but it’s not going to cut it if you want to maximize your poker profits.
When picking a seat at the table, it helps out a lot if you play at the same time of the day/stakes/online poker room and recognize some of the players. After all, if you don’t recognize any of the players at a table, then you won’t know how they play the game. Going even further, if you don’t know what their playing style is, what’s the point of putting any thought into what seat you pick. Now, onto some strategy for picking seats……
You want to keep the aggressive players to your right. The reason why is because aggressive players are going to raise a lot of pots, and attempt to steal your blinds too if you’re seated in front of them. But if you are seated behind them, you can fold when you’ve got nothing, and re-raise them when you have really good hands.
In regards to the player sitting to your left, you want a tight/aggressive player who’s not going to challenge your raises and re-raises. And if the player directly behind you isn’t challenging your raises, you can steal their blinds and small pots when there’s no action in a hand. Likewise, every time they re-raise you, you’ll know to fold when holding marginal hands because they obviously have a great hand.
So whenever possible, try to find tables where you know the players, and wedge yourself in between an aggressive (to the right) and tight (to the left) player.
